The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(6)
“Don’t look!” I said, but they ignored me as always, and the light scorched through the soft flesh of their eyes.
They screamed and released me, clapping their hands over their eyes and crumpling to the ground. I held my sleeve over my face as the glass panes of the lantern burst outward and thousands of sharp crystals rained down like hellfire, singeing holes in my cloak with white-hot sparks. The time freeze collapsed, snow pelting my face and turning the lingering flames to swirling steam. I slapped the embers off my skirt, then turned to the three blind and sobbing High Reapers, collapsed in melted snow puddles, their cloaks steaming quietly, surrounded by pieces of my hair.
The image forced a sneer to my lips before I could stop myself. This is what they deserve, to be on their knees in front of me. But the feeling drained away as fast as it had come, like a sudden eclipse of darkness. I looked down at my trembling hands, scored with glass shards, my sheared hair blowing across my face, the sobbing Reapers at my feet trying to rub the blood from their eyes.
I had ruined everything.
I dashed into the snow, slipping on a patch of ice and clawing my way back to my feet. I prayed that the light would keep them incapacitated. As long as they couldn’t see, they couldn’t trap me again or make their way back home. No matter what, I had to stay ahead of Ivy. As soon as the High Council got word that I’d assaulted three High Reapers, one of them the great granddaughter of Ankou himself, I could safely say I’d be chained up in a mausoleum for the next millennium. I had to turn in my soul vials to Collections, then get home to tell Neven what happened.
I looked over my shoulder as I ran, taking in the ice-polished cobblestones and evergreen garlands and redbrick chimneys scratching the stars through the eyes of someone seeing them for the last time. Every step was a goodbye to a place I’d never really loved but that had made up my entire world.
I turned and looked ahead again, because in the end it wasn’t even a choice. I wouldn’t wait around for them to put me in chains. I would leave London, and I would never come back.
Chapter Two
At the far edge of London, somewhere between nightmares and formless dreams, the Reapers slept by daylight.
The only way to enter our home was through the catacombs of the Highgate Cemetery, through a door that no longer existed. It had been built there long ago, when the Britons first came to our land and Ankou carved a hole in their world so that Death could enter. But humans had sealed it shut with layers of wood, then stone, then brick and mortar, all in the hopes of keeping Death out.
By the nineteenth century, humans had mostly forgotten about the Door and what it meant. Then, when the London churchyards began to overflow with bones, the humans had searched for a place just outside of London to bury their dead. By chance or fate, they’d built their new cemetery right on top of the Door. It turned out that Death drew all of us close, even if we weren’t aware of it.
No streetlights lit the path through Highgate at night, but I didn’t need them to find my way home. Before I’d even passed through the main gate, Death pulled me closer. All Reapers were drawn to him, our bones magnetized to the place of our forefather. As soon as I entered the cemetery, a humming began just under my skin, like a train’s engine beginning to whir. My blood flushed faster through my veins as I brushed aside the branches of winter-barren lime trees and low-hanging elms. My boots crunched shattering steps into the frosted pathways as I ran.
I stumbled through jagged rows of ice-cracked tombstones on uneven ground and through a village of mausoleums, finally reaching the gothic arched doorway of the catacomb entrance. The pull had grown unbearable, dragging me along in a dizzy trance as I descended the stairs into the cool quietness of damp bricks and darkness. The labyrinth would have been unnavigable if not for the fervent pull.
At last, my hands came out to touch the wall where the Door used to be, but now there were only damp bricks and an inscription on the arch overhead that read When Ankou comes, he will not go away empty in rigid script. I dug one hand into my pocket and clutched my clock, pressed my other hand to the bricks, then closed my eyes and turned time all the way back to the beginning.
Time flowed through the silver-and-gold gears, up into my bloodstream and through my fingertips, dispersing into the brick wall. Centuries crumbled away, the mortar growing wet and bricks falling loose. One by one, they leaped out of their positions in the wall and aligned themselves in dry stacks on the ground, waiting once again for construction. Objects were easy to manipulate with time, for I could draw from their own intrinsic energy rather than siphoning off my own. Bricks could last for centuries before they crumbled to dust, so it was easy enough to borrow years from them rather than paying in years of my own life, quickly repaying the time debt when I put them back in place.
I stepped through the doorway and the pull released me all at once. I breathed in a deep gasp of the wet night air, then turned around and sealed the door behind me. The bricks jumped back to their positions in the wall, caked together by layers of mortar that dried instantly, the time debt repaid.
The catacombs beyond the threshold spanned infinitely forward, appropriated as resting places for Reapers rather than corpses. Mounted lanterns cast a faint light onto the dirt floors and gray bricks. It was almost Last Toll, so only the last of the Reapers returning from the night shift still milled around, their silver capes catching the dim light of the tunnels, but most had retreated to their private quarters for the morning.